This release relates to stable versions of helper functions used extract sea surface temperatures for a region of choice from downloaded NOAA CRW 3.1 daily data. It also provides analysis code that creates a degree heating week metric. This metric and others generated in the demonstration code were used in Strydom, S., Murray, K., Wilson, S., Huntley, B., Rule, M., Heithaus, M., Bessey, C., Kendrick, G. A., Burkholder, D., Fraser, M. W., & Zdunic, K. (2020). Too hot to handle: Unprecedented seagrass death driven by marine heatwave in a World Heritage Area. Global Change Biology, 26(6), 3525-3538. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.15065